System administrators may migrate virtual machines from one location to another in order to upgrade hardware, perform system maintenance, manage system resources, or improve virtual machine performance. In some cases, a system administrator may avoid any downtime for a virtual machine by performing a live migration (e.g., keeping the original instance of the virtual machine running until a duplicate instance is ready to take over at an alternate location). For example, the state of the virtual processor and the virtual memory of the virtual machine may be copied to a target hypervisor. Once the target hypervisor is loaded with the virtual machine, the virtual machine may continue to run as before.
However, in order to fully preserve the statefulness of the migrated virtual machine, the virtual machine may also require the same storage view. Ordinarily this may be achieved simply by directing the migrated virtual machine to the same storage device that it used before. Unfortunately, if the target location for a live migration of a virtual machine is a long distance from the original location of the virtual machine (e.g., in a different data center), the original storage device may be too far from the target location of the virtual machine, introducing unacceptable latency. Furthermore, a system administrator may wish to take the original storage device offline as well (e.g., due to an expected outage at the original data center). Accordingly, the instant disclosure addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for migrating virtual machines.